Painters Interpret Scripture
Painting the Word ㉙ Vincent van Gogh — The Sower and a Calling He Never Reached
Under a blazing sunset sky, a black silhouette of a farmer strides forward, scattering seed by hand. An enormous sun, filling nearly half the canvas, burns behind his head like a halo, while the furrowed field at his feet lies still bare of any growth. The man who painted this had once wanted to stand in a pulpit and preach the gospel, but the church would not have him. This installment of Painting the Word turns to Vincent van Gogh and his repeated returns to The Sower.
Who Was Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was born the eldest son of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. After a period working as an assistant at an art dealership, he seriously pursued the path of ministry himself — preparing for, then abandoning, theological entrance exams in Amsterdam, and in 1878 moving to the mining district of the Borinage in Belgium to live and work devotedly among the miners as a lay evangelist. The following year, the church board declined to renew his position, and it was out of this rejection that Van Gogh began to treat painting, rather than ministry, as his true calling. Over the final decade of his life he returned to Jean-François Millet’s The Sower (1850) again and again, painting more than thirty versions and reinterpretations of it — including the 1888 Arles version now held at the Kröller-Müller Museum.
The Text — Matthew 13:3-8 (The Parable of the Sower)
The figure of a sower connects directly to the parable Jesus used to describe the spreading of his word.
“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path… Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:3-4, 8)
Reading the Painting — Sowing With the Sun at His Back
Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888, oil on canvas, 64.2 × 80.3 cm — Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons, PD-old-70-expired, artist died 1890).
A huge yellow sun occupies the upper right, seeming to set half the sky on fire, while a black-silhouetted farmer strides forward from the lower left, a sack of seed slung over his shoulder. Where Millet’s original rendered the labor’s hardship realistically in the dim light of dusk, Van Gogh layers on extreme complementary contrasts — yellow sky against violet earth, orange sun against blue furrows — pushing the simple act of sowing toward something almost mystical. The field beneath the farmer’s feet remains freshly turned and empty of any visible growth, yet the sun blazing behind him wraps his head in what reads unmistakably as a halo.
Theological Reading — An Evangelical Imagination That Outlasted the Pulpit
The art historian Kathleen Powers Erickson, in her 1998 study At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh, shows that even after Van Gogh broke with the institutional church as an adult, his art as a whole remained rooted in a deeply Christian imagination. Erickson traces how he returned repeatedly not only to The Sower but to overtly religious subjects such as The Raising of Lazarus, The Good Samaritan, and the Pietà — in the last of which he painted Christ’s face with his own features. She argues that what had gripped Van Gogh since his years as an evangelist in the Borinage never left him: the tradition of the vita apostolica, the apostolic life of self-emptying solidarity with the lowly, represented for him above all by two books he carried throughout his life, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Read in this light, his more than thirty returns to Millet’s sower were not simply a painter’s technical exercises but something closer to a gesture of carrying the calling to spread the gospel — closed off to him at the pulpit — forward onto the canvas instead, laying his own hope of living as one who sows the word over the figure of the farmer scattering seed.
Coming Next
The next installment turns to Van Gogh’s Church at Auvers, painted at Auvers-sur-Oise, and the trace of a lost faith it carries.
Works Cited
English-language
- Kathleen Powers Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998) — the standard study of Van Gogh’s religious life and the apostolic tradition running through his art, including his repeated returns to the sower motif and other explicitly religious subjects
The image above is a public-domain (PD-old-70-expired) scan hosted on Wikimedia Commons. The work listed above is a real, verifiable scholarly publication. No rigorously peer-reviewed Korean-language academic study specifically addressing this painting could be verified for this installment, so that section has been omitted.
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